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Technology Overview
Mac OS X Server
Operating System
Fundamentals
Mac OS X Server has an open source, UNIX-based foundation that provides a stable,
high-performance platform for deploying business-critical enterprise applications,
services, and technologies. The core operating system at the heart of Mac OS X Server
is known as Darwin.
UNIX-Based Foundation
Darwin provides Mac OS X Server with the stability, performance, and compatibility
associated with UNIX. It’s built around the Mach 3.0 microkernel, which is based on
the OSF/mk project from the Open Software Foundation. The Mach kernel in Darwin
provides services for memory management, thread control, hardware abstraction,
and interprocess communication. It also brings advanced features critical to the
operation of a server, including ne-grained multithreading, symmetric multiprocess-
ing (SMP), protected memory, a uni ed bu! er cache, 64-bit kernel services, and
system noti cations.
Darwin also includes the latest technological advances from the open source BSD
community. Originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley, BSD is the
foundation of most UNIX implementations today. Darwin is based in large part on
FreeBSD and includes the latest innovations from that development community.
64-Bit Computing
64-bit computing is the next big step in providing greater computing power to solve
even the most challenging tasks. It gives scientists, engineers, and other power users
the tools to address problems that are billions of times larger than the ones that can
be solved with 32-bit systems.
Mac OS X Server v10.4 brings the power of 64-bit computing to mainstream servers.
Its 64-bit addressing o! ers access to massive amounts of memory, transcending the
4GB memory limitation of 32-bit systems. And its 64-bit optimized math libraries
provide high-performance, extremely accurate mathematical calculations. These capa-
bilities make Mac OS X Server the ideal platform for the most demanding databases
and scienti c, technical, and creative computing tasks.